Google Caffeine is Now Live – A Major Update to the Search Index

Google has released a major revision to it’s search index. They call it Caffeine. At the Search Engine Land conference/expo SMX, SEL founder Danny Sullivan interviews Google’s Matt Cutts about the changes.

Vanessa Fox, a former Googler turned SEO consultant wrote the following in Search Engine Land:

So what is Caffeine and what does its launch mean for searchers and content owners?

Maile Ohye, of Google’s Webmaster Central told me “the entire web is expanding and evolving and Caffeine means that we can better evolve with it. As the ecosystem improves, we improve too and return more relevant content to searchers.” Google’s Matt Cutts added that “Caffeine benefits both searchers and content owners because it means that all content (and not just content deemed “real time”) can be searchable within seconds after its crawled.”

Caffeine is a revamp of Google’s indexing infrastructure. It is not a change to Google’s ranking algorithms. It is live across all data centers, regions, and languages.

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How can content owners best take advantage of the new infrastructure?

Content owners will reap the benefits of Caffeine without doing anything at all. In fact, there’s really not much, if anything content owners can do. Some may wonder if this change means that existing best practices around crawl efficiency matter more than before. Is page speed, which Google has focused on more lately, more important? Nope. Google told me that this change doesn’t make any of the crawling, indexing, or ranking factors more or less important than before. It simply makes crawled content available in search results more quickly before and paves the way for added flexibility in taking advantage of the whatever may come as the web evolves.

Other things that have changed with the Caffeine release are:

Content is available to searchers more quickly

Google’s storage capacity has greatly increased

Google’s flexibility in storing information about documents has greatly increased

What do you think of the new revision to the Google search index? Has it effected your rankings in anyway? Post your thoughts in the comments.

Seth Goldstein is the Principal Creative Director at Goldstein Media LLC. He has been in the Web design and Internet marketing business for more than 10 years. A self-proclaimed technologist, Seth is addicted to all types of technology. He loves to help businesses of all sizes figure out the best way to use the Internet to grow their business.